“Life in Christ”

Orthodox Christians begin and end the liturgical year with celebrations dedicated to the Virgin Mary, whom we venerate as the Theotokos or “bearer of God.” On September 8, the end of the first week of the new year, we commemorate her Nativity or birth; on August 15, we close the year with the feast of her Dormition, her “falling asleep” and…

A devastating cartoon appeared recently in our local paper. The caption reads: “The New Sacrament.” It depicts a somber and stately Episcopal church, with stained glass windows and cathedral ceiling. The view is from the back of the altar area, looking out toward the nave. Several small, robed figures surround a cleric, who is garbed all in white.…

Two recent cases illustrate the difficulty—and often the agony—experienced by family members and medical teams when they have to decide whether or not to remove life-support from an apparently dying patient.

This past July a twenty-six year old man was reportedly placed on life-support following an automobile accident. He was in a coma for two…

Some questions never go away, even those we think we’ve answered once and for all. One of those questions concerns the beginning of human life: when we as human beings actually come into existence. This is a biological issue, intimately linked to, yet independent of, the philosophical or theological matter of when the child in utero can be judged to…

Life in Christ is made up of countless small yet touchingly beautiful miracles.

Throughout the afternoon I had been reading some recent reflections by a variety of bioethicists on the possibilities and apprehensions surrounding human cloning: in particular, fabricating children in our own image and likeness by a-sexual replication through the…

The phone rang right at suppertime. An hysterical voice on the other end started berating me for not listening to her, for abandoning her in her most dire need, for not really hearing her confession, for being self-centered and abusive towards her and everyone else in the parish. No, rather it was the parish community itself, those egotistical,…

There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the richness of Orthodox tradition regarding “prayer of the heart” and the poor prayer that is part of our personal experience. Prayer of the heart requires “hesychia,” a deep inner stillness that permits us to hear “the still small voice of God.” Is that really within our reach today, given the…

A young Orthodox priest had just arrived in the hospital waiting room to minister to a grieving family. He talked for a while with the oldest member, a man in his late sixties who was struggling to come to terms with his wife’s rapid decline.

The priest—call him ‘Father Paul’—spent a few minutes with the husband, then went into the ICU where…

With the U.S. Senate voting overwhelmingly to ban the late-term procedure known as “partial birth abortion,” we are led, as Christians in a highly secular and pluralistic society, to look once again at the implications of what the French euphemistically call the “voluntary interruption of a pregnancy.”

Over the centuries, theologians have held…

Orthodox Christianity calls us to live on two different but intimately related levels. One is the level of daily experience: life in family and on the job, paying bills and doing the shopping, cutting the grass and getting the kids to their various activities. It is also life marked by anxiety in a world of war and political upheaval, of poverty and…

Liturgy is in essence worship: praise and glorification of the Holy Trinity. It also serves to glorify the saints and to convey to us the significance of their lives within the Church of their time and ours. This includes important aspects of their teaching. Liturgical services dedicated to the saints provide us with theological understanding, just…

In a remarkable little book entitled Body of Death and of Glory, the French Orthodox theologian and historian, Olivier Clément speaks of the fundamental reason for Christian asceticism.

“Asceticism can only be understood in the perspective of the resurrected, liturgical body. Asceticism signifies the effort to strip away our masks, those neurotic…

Six years ago, the world said “hello” to Dolly, the first mammal to be a-sexually produced through a process of cloning. On February 14, scientists at the Scottish Roslin Institute, where Dolly was created and lived, announced that they had to euthanize Dolly, because she had acquired a progressive and fatal lung disease.

In its report on Dolly’s…

It is a moral and spiritual imperative for Orthodox Christians to consecrate all of their wealth and possessions to God, for His purpose and to His glory. This imperative was given concrete expression by the Old Testament commandment to offer tithes: one tenth of produce and livestock was consecrated to the Lord in imitation of Abram’s offering of a…

Silence is not just the absence of ambient noise.
Nor does it mean the lack of laughter or music or shared reflection.

Silence is a state of mind and heart, a condition of the soul. It is inner stillness.

Silence in heaven reigns amidst joyous song and ceaseless celebration.
It is awe in the presence of the Divine.

Silence in this world leads us…

At the end of each January we commemorate “Sanctity of Life” Sunday and focus our attention on the tragic number of abortions in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world. It’s a time when we again recoil from the realization that the highest abortion rates, as far as we know, occur in “Orthodox” countries. It seems appropriate, then, to…

A defining characteristic of Orthodox Christianity is the intimate and inseparable relationship it preserves between Bible and Liturgy, between divine revelation as the canonical or normative source of our faith, and celebration of that faith in the worship of the Church. Faith, grounded in Scripture, determines the content of our worship; worship…

The mystery of Christ’s Nativity is above all a paschal mystery. Pascha, in our Orthodox tradition, refers first of all to Easter, the feast of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Yet it refers as well to every image of sacrifice that was revealed during Jesus’ earthly ministry, from His birth, through His baptism and transfiguration, to His…

Prior to the two great fasting periods that prepare Christ’s Nativity (Christmas) and His Resurrection (Pascha), the Sunday lectionary invites us to read the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). This passage offers one of the best examples of the way the early Church Fathers moved from a literal to a spiritual reading of the text,…

There is a troubling and fascinating debate going on right now that we should all be at least somewhat familiar with. It concerns our most fundamental vision of God, the world and ourselves. And it has divided Christian against Christian, and Christians against the secular, “post-modern” culture in which we live.

The debate has been expressed in…